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The Future of the New York Steakhouse

By Pete Wells January 15, 2013 5:22 pmJanuary 15, 2013 5:22 pm

Photo

The rib-eye steak at Arlington Club.Credit Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times

Is the steakhouse done?

In my review of Arlington Club this week, I point out that some of the best things to eat there have no business in a place that claims to be a steakhouse: popovers, French-style gnocchi, carrot-cake madeleines and crepes soufflés, an old-school French dessert. This led me to ask if Arlington Club had an identity crisis, or if perhaps it was the steakhouse genre itself that was confused.

Just four or five years ago, it seemed that a new steakhouse opened in Manhattan every few months. This was during the boom; steak consumption tends to rise in expanding economies, as witness the craze for imported beef in Russia and Asia.

There haven’t been as many new steakhouses around town since the economy shifted into idle. Arlington Club is the first I’ve reviewed in my year on the job. This makes me wonder: Is the New York steakhouse merely taking a breather, or will it continue to decline once the economy is roaring again?

Steakhouses aren’t especially on-trend right now. Porterhouses that drape over the edge of their platters can seem out of step with the appetites of modern New Yorkers, who line up to eat blossoms and shoots tweezed into artful disarray over a morsel of protein no bigger than an overcoat button.

But styles of serving food come and go. A more lasting problem might be our perceptions of the meat itself. Classic steakhouse beef is fattened on corn before slaughter. The feedlots where this happens can be no picnic for the cows, who have a hard time digesting corn, or for the waterways that happen to be downstream. As Michael Pollan and other writers have set out a critique of feedlot beef over the past decade or so, it’s become more difficult to regard marbled steak that glistens with fat as an American birthright.

I’ve had some great nights in New York’s steakhouses. They all involve abandon: abandoning my diet, abandoning my worries about getting blood on my tie, abandoning my usual notions of just how big and expensive dinner should be.

I’m happy to check those concerns with my coat. But it’s not so easy to abandon what we now know about traditional beef, just as it’s not easy to forget the cries of alarm that scientists have raised about Bluefin tuna stocks.

Giving up beef is the answer for some people. Not for me. I love it. But I am less happy about the ritual of gorging on oversized cuts of beef that have been raised in ways that are becoming hard to defend. Dinner in a steakhouse may soon feel like one of those cultural relics that we take part in even though we’ve stopped believing in them, something like the groom’s pre-wedding expedition to a strip club. (On that subject, has anyone been to Roberts in the Penthouse Executive Club recently? Let me know in the comments, along with your thoughts on whether steakhouses are still relevant.)